At one point it was reported that the
Juilliard School had signed an agreement to set up an
institute in Yujiapu. And there were plans for a Rockefeller and
Lincoln Center as well.

But construction in this Manhattan hopeful has ground to a halt.

According to
Bloomberg's Steve Engle and Xin Zhou, a Tianjin
local-government financing vehicle (LGFV) saw its revenue fall
68% last year and about a third of its debt will mature this
year.

Michael Hart, managing director at Jones Lang LaSalle Inc told
Bloomberg that the local government can force some state-owned
enterprises (SOEs) to be the first to occupy the abandoned
buildings, but that it won't be easy to do.

"It was a failure before it even started,” Gao Fei of Centaline
Property told Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for
Marketplace/American Public Media. “The most important thing
for Tianjin’s government has always been a high GDP rate. That
means the government has to spend a lot of money on huge projects
like this one. In China, these kinds of wasteful projects are
everywhere.”